


the seventh degree

by influtteringprint



Category: Avatar: Legend of Korra
Genre: Angst, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-06
Updated: 2015-05-06
Packaged: 2018-03-29 06:23:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3885697
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/influtteringprint/pseuds/influtteringprint
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She doesn't expect him to finally come home to her.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the seventh degree

Due warning: this is the aftermath of [this](http://influtteringprint.tumblr.com/post/116169592101/okay-but-consider-this-post-book-4-au-situation).

 

There are butterflies fluttering in the pit of her stomach, gentle wings brushing against the underside of her heart, the insides of her ribcage. Tonight was the night of her and Han’s engagement party, and the ring that sits on her left ring finger winks at her as she thinks this. They’re making their rounds, now - Han’s father was a well known businessman in the bustling commercial ring of Omashu, and Jinora’s own extended family wasn’t a force to be reckoned with either. She’s been meeting and greeting and accepting congratulations from people for the better part of the past hour, and though she’s grateful for it all, she can’t deny that she’s starting to feel weary down to her bones. The miserable small helping of dinner Pema had given her - along with the bites Korra and Ikki had managed to sneak her - weren’t nearly enough sustenance, and Jinora feels bad for wishing the night is over.

Han’s hand is warm and gentle on the small of her back, and his smile is large and genuine. ‘Just a little bit longer,’ he murmurs out of the corner of his mouth, and Jinora smiles. She pulls his hand out from behind her to hold it in hers, intertwines their fingers instead.

'You’re going to have to make this up to me somehow,’ mutters Jinora, her smile still firmly in place. 'I’m starving.’

'I promise,’ says Han, leaning down to kiss her temple. 'Tomorrow morning, breakfast. You name it, I’ll cook it.'

A grateful thank you is mouthed before yet another one of Han’s family’s business associates ambushes them, this time an entire family of seven. Jinora finds herself bombarded by an endless flow of questions, her robes being tugged on by curious hands, and by the end of the exchange she’s just about ready to dissolve into tears. It doesn’t take much for Han to notice her distress, though, and before long he lays a kiss on her cheek before speeding up the greeting process. They seem to get through twice as many guests in half the time, and by the time the last guest has left, Jinora’s ready to cry tears of relief, instead.

She gets some food in her and those awfully achy shoes off before Han leads her to the front door, slings both his arms around her waist and presses their foreheads together. 'I’m going to go and spend the night at the hotel with my family,’ he murmurs, drawing back a little to tuck a strand of hair behind her ears.

Jinora smiles. She brings a hand up to cover Han’s on her cheek, leans into the warmth of his touch. 'Sounds like you’re trying to get out of that promise you made me earlier,’ she teases, a knowing note in her voice. 'Don’t think you’re getting out of that easily.’

Han laughs, the sound a deep rumble in his chest. 'I’m not,’ he reassures, thumb drawing circles on his fiancée’s cheek. 'I’ll see you bright and early, beautiful. Start thinking about what you want me to make,’

'Okay,’ she murmurs, and then he kisses her goodbye. She watches for a bit until his silhouette disappears down the main steps of Air Temple Island, smiles to herself as she shuts the door, grateful that she has someone who adores her. Someone who wants to spend the rest of his life with her.

She’s still in the process of digesting these thoughts when a series of urgent knocks comes at the door, and the sound of it has her smile instinctively growing larger. She undoes the locks and turns the handle, is about to throw herself back into the arms of her fiancé when -

'I waited.’

That voice.

'I mean - I waited for him to leave. That’s… That’s what I meant.’

If there was ever a time Jinora felt the most disconnected with her element, it was now. It felt like she was being swept up in a furiously uncontrollable typhoon, its undercurrents whipping about her ears and drowning out all other sound, including the sound of her own heartbeat, until the last thing she could hear, the only thing she could hear was that voice.

Was him.

'I mean - I just didn’t want him to see me, you know, coming to see you, even though, I mean, there’s really nothing for him to be afraid of, because, I mean, it’s not like I’m going to kidnap you or anything, because you’d probably windslam me and I kind of don’t want that, and - ’

'Kai.’

He stops. His flurried words, his frantic grasping for the next syllable - it stops. Something in his eyes changes when he hears her say his name, and she doesn’t yet know if that’s a good thing or not.

And then -

'Jinora.’

And then he says her name. He coats it in a voice she didn’t know she’d been missing so badly, didn’t know if she’d ever hear again. And yet - and yet there it was, the same as always - if a little deeper - saying her name in much the same way it did the last time she heard it.

He’s here.

Kai is really here.

She’s shaken down to her very core, to the foundation of her being. It’s been years, is all she can thinks, years and he looks - he looks so well, has grown another couple of inches since they’d last met, some stubble beginning to dawn on his chin. He looks different and the same all at once, and Jinora thinks she can feel herself trembling.

Her thoughts are confirmed when Kai’s brows knit together in concern, uncertainty lining the very hesitant move he makes. 'Hey,’ he says, soft and gentle this time as he moves forward, his hand almost reaching to hold hers.

Almost.

'What are you doing here?’ asks Jinora, and she’s trying to keep her voice steady, but even she can tell it isn’t working. He’s got her tethered to the quaking ground with his presence, and she isn’t going anywhere. 'What are you doing here?’

'Um - well, to be honest… Meelo invited me. He sent me the letter last week,’ says Kai. The expression on his face changes a little. 'And then a couple of days later I got a really lengthy apology letter from Ikki, saying I didn’t have to come if I wasn’t comfortable with it. So I mean - I mean I haven’t been, you know, keeping tabs on you or anything. I wouldn’t… I wouldn’t do that.’

Something in Jinora stirs when she hears him speak so familiarly of her siblings. It’s intense and it’s been dormant for a long time - it’s the feeling of warmth she recognises as the one she’d only get when he’s around.

She hates it. She hates how right it feels, how it makes the butterflies in her stomach sing.

How it’s never happened with Han.

‘Why did you come back here?’ Jinora asks, almost spitting the words at his feet. She hasn’t seen Kai since the summer before her sixteenth birthday - that was six years ago, six years of intermittent worrying, reluctant pining, missing - six whole years he put her through that, six whole years she had to go through never knowing if he was even still alive or not. The fury of all those years comes to boil in her gut, and her next words are thrown at him with venom. ‘Why did you come here tonight?’ She’s almost shrieking now, her chest heaving up and down, and Kai looks like he wants so badly to touch her, to comfort her - but he doesn’t.

He holds back.

She doesn’t know where all this rage is coming from - all she knows is it’s coming hard and it’s coming fast, and soon her hands are clenched into fists at her side and her gaze has turned into a glare. ‘You had six years to come back,’ she begins, ‘Why did you choose tonight?’

Kai’s eyes go wide. ‘Jinora - ’

She doesn’t let him finish. ‘Every time I tried asking Opal about you, she told me she couldn’t say, because you told her not to.’

‘Jinora, I - ’

There are tears beginning to blur her vision, but she decides she doesn’t much care. She’s waited too long for this, after all. ‘Do you know how worried sick I was?’

Kai’s eyes are beginning to grow frantic, the set of his mouth trembling under the weight of her glare - ‘I’m sorry Jinora, I really - ’

The next few words are accompanied by tears flowing freely from her eyes, are shrieked at him from the top of her lungs, are so empty and so broken she feels as though all her happiness from just a few hours ago has spilled over and disappeared altogether. She looks him in the eye. 'Do you know how much pain you put me through?’

And he immediately grows silent. He hangs his head so she can only barely make out the tip of his nose, hidden by a curtain of dark hair. His voice isn’t frantic anymore - but it’s still shaking. It still trembles.

He meets her glare with eyes as soft as water, with tears of his own beginning to well.

‘Do you know how much it hurt me thinking I’d have to give you up to him?’

Another bout of silence falls over them, and the only thing they can hear is the sound of crickets chirping in the background, and water lapping up at the edges of the shore.

He breaks the silence first, lets a sigh out before he speaks.

‘Look - I didn’t come here to fight,’ he says, quietly and gently, with his hands stretched outwards, palms up. 'Okay? I came here to… Okay, look, you’re right. Six years is a long time. And throughout those years… Jinora, Jinora, I can’t stand here and say there was a single day that went by where I didn’t think about you, because that… That would be a lie.’

All the rage from her body disappears with his words. She relaxes, if only slightly. ‘Kai,’ she says, so softly even he doesn’t hear her.

‘And I could never lie to you,’ he says, laughing a little to himself, ‘I’m not going to start now,’ he says. One of his hands comes up to rake through his hair, and Jinora only looks at it longingly - follows the movements of his fingers, remembers all too well how it felt for her to do just that.

‘What do you mean?’ she asks, and the rage is all but a forgotten shadow in the night, her voice coming out slow and hoarse and soft this time.

Kai takes a deep breath. ‘When I asked you if you were happy, and you said yes, I thought that would be it,’ he says, with the air of a man finally unloading the weight of the world from his shoulders. ‘I thought that that would be enough for me, to know that you’re happy with whoever you choose to be happy with, but I didn’t see it for how one sided it was.’  He takes a hesitant step forward, tries not to wince when Jinora instinctively takes a step back.

He clears his throat. ‘I didn’t… I thought hiding my feelings for you would make things easier for us both, but it didn’t. It’s been six years, like you said - and it still hasn’t.’

There’s a maelstrom wind growing in her chest, and it swells with every word that escapes his lips. A part of her wants him to stop, wants the flow of words - and emotions - to stop, but a bigger part of her… A bigger part of her wants to listen. ‘Kai,’ she says, her voice shaking, ‘Kai - I’m getting married.’

‘And I realise that,’ he says, a different kind of lilt to his voice now, one that’s altogether far less hopeful tinging his words. ‘I know - as much as it kills me, I know.’

His gaze drops to the ground and Jinora can hear her heart thumping loudly in her chest, can feel it leap from its home in her chest to settle in her throat. ‘And that’s why I’m asking you now - now, months before you become his wife, months before you promise yourself to him forever. I’m asking you because I need to know. Because - because I need to be able to sleep at night.’

She shouldn’t ask him, but she’s known, for a long time now, that when it comes to Kai, there are far more things she’s willing to do over things she’s not. ‘What is it?’

‘Jinora.’  
‘Yeah?’  
‘Do you love him?’

Whatever it is that she was expecting, it wasn’t this. It wasn’t this question, from someone she can’t realistically see herself living her life without. Still - still, the weight of Han’s ring on her finger reminds her that this situation isn’t just about her, and it isn’t just about the man in front of her, either. The thought of all those people she’d just met spurns her on, and she clears her throat before she speaks. ‘Of course I d - ’

‘The way you loved me?’

There’s nothing but innocent curiosity in his voice when Kai says those words. The way his breathing has suddenly become heavy, paced - she can tell that this isn’t coming from a place of malice. He genuinely needs to know, but Jinora - she doesn’t know if she’s got the right answer for him, or not.

‘Jinora?’ he ventures, and the single word is enough to trigger a fresh bout of tears.

‘Kai this isn’t fair - ’

‘This whole situation isn’t fair, Jinora.’ He says all of this with urgency, and when he steps forward it’s with the fluid motion of a leaf dancing in the wind, and Jinora doesn’t find herself moving away. Not even when he reaches out and takes her hand, not even when he lifts it so the overhead light hits the diamond on her finger. ‘If it were fair, then this - would be mine.’

She snaps out of her reverie long enough to snatch her hand away from him, clutches it close to her chest instead. ‘You can’t - ’ she splutters, unable to find her words, ‘I - how could I even - compare - ’

‘Just - Jinora I need to know.’ His hands fall back by his side, his shoulders sag - he looks like a man whose hope has been snatched out from right under his nose, and as much as she hates that it does - her heart goes out to him. ‘I need to know because if you do, if you love him like you loved me, or even - even more than that - I need to know that maybe one day all of that will be possible for me, too. I need to know that maybe someday I’ll be able to fall in love with someone that’s not you, enough to spend the rest of my life with, because - ’

Here he trails off, his voice bitten away by the gravity of what he’s about to confess.

‘Because?’ she urges, gently curious.

‘Because it’s been six years and the way I’ve felt about other people- the way I’ve felt about anyone else, hasn’t even been able to come close to the way I feel about you.’

He shuffles forward a little more, takes both her hands in his. This time she doesn’t snatch them away - this time she lets herself feel his warmth again, even if it’s in minute pieces, even if she knows she shouldn’t. ‘Jinora - ever since I met you, you always gave me hope.’

‘Kai, I...’

He ignores her, and goes on. ‘And it’s been six years I’ve had to live without that hope. Just - if you can’t be my hope anymore, please just - give me something new to hope for.’ His voice is properly shaking now, the tears in his eyes finally breaking loose and falling down his cheeks, but he doesn’t swipe them away, doesn’t make any move to get rid of them. His full focus is only on Jinora, and it reminds her how much she revelled in feeling like she was his whole world and he, hers.

Silence congeals in the space between them, and slowly, slowly, slowly she withdraws her hands from his, holds them together to her chest. The realisation has finally dawned on her - she knows what she wants, knows it with a certainty that shakes her to her very bones. She almost laughs to herself - she can’t believe it’s taken her this long to see.

She knows what she wants.

It takes her a while to gather courage enough to speak, and when she does - it’s nothing more than a broken whisper, nothing more than a single word.

‘No.’

If ever she’d seen someone’s world crash in front of them - it was right then, with Kai. Something inside him just seemed to shatter with that single word, and immediately guilt and a surge of something else seeps into her, and she wants to take it all back. It’s in this moment that she realises - this isn’t what she wants. The ring on her finger isn’t the one she’s been waiting all this time for - the way the man who gave it to her makes her feel couldn’t possibly measure up to how she feels right now, with this man trembling in front of her, with this man she’s missed so terribly over the last few years.

She will rebuild their world together with her bare hands, stitch together their fraying edges again. She will love him, and this time, she’ll love him the way he deserves.

‘Oh. Well. Thanks, Jinora. I - I hope you have a beautiful wedding and life together, I’m ha - ’

She doesn’t let him finish. In a single movement she moves forward, enough so she can feel their hearts beating in sync, and she slings her arms around his neck and pulls him close, pulls him in for a kiss she didn’t know she’s been longing for for so long.

It takes him by surprise for all of five seconds, before he’s settling his hands on either side of her waist, gripping her, and kissing back. There are tears mixed in between their mouths and this really isn’t the most picture perfect reunion, but they both find that neither of them really cares. What matters is that it’s him, and it’s her, and all those years they’ve spent apart - they’re finally, finally over.

When they pull apart she keeps her arms around his neck, and he keeps his hands on her waist. They press their foreheads together, and there are identical smiles on both their lips.

‘No,’ she says, looking him straight in the eye, ‘I could never love him the way I love you.’

He breaks out into a full on grin this time, his happiness shining on his features.

‘I love you too.’

(she gives the ring back the next morning ok) (don’t worry about it) (here’s the happy compensation) (that’s like a month late whoops)


End file.
